Def. going to sign up for this as soon as I get home. I bet they are looking for PCs on a range of hardware, so Imma have my gf register on my mid range laptop, and I will register on my high end desktop.

"No I don't want the Ask toolbar! No I don't want Bing as my default search! No I don't want to make Chrome my default browser!""Good grief, man! WHAT are you trying to install on that poor computer?""Antivirus."

Hey guys, long time no chat. I actually started playing Gw1 again (wouldn't mind a CBE invite if you're all still around). The scan is just to get the basics of your machine to them, it doesn't benchmark anything. It doesn't seem to notice more than one drive so I'm sure my SSD OS drive having on 5GB free will look strange to them.

steelcity_ballin wrote:Hey guys, long time no chat. I actually started playing Gw1 again (wouldn't mind a CBE invite if you're all still around). The scan is just to get the basics of your machine to them, it doesn't benchmark anything. It doesn't seem to notice more than one drive so I'm sure my SSD OS drive having on 5GB free will look strange to them.

Some posts in another forum say that while the scan doesn't show multiple videocards / HDDs the information in sent correctly to Anet. PM sent about CBE invite.

The Internet wrote:"[The] 360 starts at the factory, moves to retail shelves, into consumer's homes, back to Microsoft. So THAT'S why Microsoft called it the 360...It all comes full-circle "

I got my application in. I've never been invited to any beta for a game yet, so here's to hoping. I have the time to devote, a killer rig, and experience with the game. I can only imagine as to what they're looking for.

tanker27 wrote:So did anyone play this past weekend and want to share their observations/ opinions?

You should've watched teh http://www.twitch.tv streams, there were plenty of people playing different characters and streaming their play (yes, it is allowed since open beta is not under any kind of NDA).I've played for some time, overall the game is fun - the PvE questing was fun, especially "dynamic events" (same thing as Warhammer Online's "public quests"). Some "story quests" (the instanced character's storyline quests that you complete solo) and "dynamic events" were too hard, some were buggy, but it's natural for the beta test and they will more likely be fixed before final release. There were no functional "dungeons" during this beta, or perhaps they were later on in the game (I've only reached lvl20 on my characters, and I believe lvl80 is max level in this game).The "World vs World vs World" PvP areas were mad fun, with large group of players playing in huge areas, attacking/defending towers/keeps, using siege equipment to storm towers/keeps, upgrading the defenses of the towers/keeps with stronger walls/stronger gates/more NPC guards/cannons/boiling oil, etc. Some adjustments were obviously needed in this area - for example once the attackers get inside the keep/tower it's basically over since it takes like a minute or less for the attacking "zerg" to reach and kill the (almost useless) tower/keep Lord. The other PvP portion was the instanced 16-people "battlegrounds", with "capture the point" - type of play, where you're instantly given all of your class abilities (regardless of your PvE level) when you enter it; I've played a couple of the rounds, found it pretty boring (I don't enjoy such tiny areas with too little people to fight with).The graphics quality of the game is very good, especially on max quality, though I had to turn down the graphics option slider in WvWvW areas and certain PvE "dynamic events" - the FPS drop was too much with huge amount of people on the screen, even for GTX680 card. All in all, I liked what I've seen in this beta and I don't think I'll be cancelling my pre-order, especially considering that there's no monthly fee involved in this game. If you want to personally see the gameplay - wait for next "open beta" event, or if you can't get into it for some reason, just tune in to http://www.twitch.tv and watch other people play, just be aware that most people stream at pretty low quality so you shouldn't judge about game's visual/graphics quality unless it's a 1080p stream.

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I played a fair bit over the last weekend. OVerall the game felt pretty polished for a beta. Rather than level one class, i chose to level 5 different classes to around level 8-12. I liked the idea of a personal story even though some of the dialogue felt a little flat; though this was largely based on your class, choices you made prior to playing during creation, and your race. You could only choose between charr, Human, and Norn.

All the areas I played felt immensely details and alive. There was a ton of things to do. I really love the idea of quests that are given to you just by coming into an area where the quest was taking place. From a PvE persecptive, this game is a refreshing experiences. Everything I love about PvE with none of the grind-type stuff I hate. For example, one of the early quests in the Norn starting area has you pay tribute to 4 animal spirits. I chose to do the spirit of the raven first. To honor the raven I could do a number of things. I could kill 'skelks' that prey on ravens, I could destroy skelk breeding grounds, I could collect raven eggs and return them to roosts, and/or I could visit raven shrines and answer riddles all of which give me partial experience towards completing the quest. The really nice thing about PvE is you're not competing with anyone else for resources be it mobs to kills, things to scavange for recipes, or whatever. So if there is a Raven egg on the ground, and someone goes to grab it, you can also grab it. After you grab it, it disappears so in a sense the item is instanced so everyone can get things done without waiting for respawns. This doesn't apply to mobs, like the skelk, BUT if we both kill it (even if I only hit it once) we both get credit and experience for killing it. I love everything about this, no more camping places. Also, if you're out-leveing an area, they work around this by lowering your effective level relative to the content. So when I hit level 10 on my Norn Engineer, I was helping my friend quest and my effective level was 3. I keep my skills, my health and damage are scaled back. I love it.

Which brings me to combat. My god, combat is amazing. At first it's a little daunting as it's like nothing I've experienced in an MMO. The focus is on actual combat and involves a rather active role with intelligent decision making rather than spamming 1 or 2 buttons. You have endurance in combat regardless of your class that allows you to double-tap a direction to perform a roll thus reducing incoming damage or mitigating it altogether. At the level I was playing, I could only dodge twice before my endurance ran out. It takes a while to regenerate this while in combat so you have to pick and choose when to use it, especially on tougher "veteran" mobs which bring the pain.

Combat is very unique for every class. you have 5 skills, of which you start with one that is tied to your class and the type of weapon you have equipped. Not every class can use every weapon but gone are the days when only rangers can use bows. So your first skill is usually the one you can spam, has a really short cooldown, and doesn't do a ton of damage or anything. As you use this skill, it unlocks the next skill slowly. If you switch weapons to a different type, you get a completely different skillset to start unlocking/using. At level 7 you can learn to hot-swap weapons in combat. Until then you have to manually switch and only out of combat. This really makes combat interesting and varied. Consider an elementalist that not only gets different skills based on if if you're using a long staff vs a wand and a focus/idol, but also you have an elemental attunement that lets you swap elemental 'stances' to cast that kind of spell. Also, you can cast on the run, always, at no penalty. This makes PvP very challenging but I'll save that for the next section. Combat is very fun, entertaining, and frustrating. At level 4, I could not defeat level 6 creatures with consistency. Maybe kill 1 but a second was a death sentence, which brings me to my next point: death in combat.

If your HP drops to 0, you fall to the ground but are not 'dead' yet. You get 4 skills relative to your class that can damage the enemy or heal yourself. If you kill the enemy, you rall y and are brought back to life. If you heal yourself enough, the same can happen. If you die completely you can still be revived as there is no resurrect spell, just that everyone can revive. The more people actively reviving you, the faster it is. If you didn't rally or heal yourself, you have a death penalty. If no one is around to res you, you can pay a small fee and come back at a recent way point (think fast travel points). I absolutely love combat. It's tough, the number and toughness of the mobs also scale with the number of players question in that area. At one point in the beta we were fighting a shaman boss who was around level 12 IIRC. There had to be 100 people fighting him and he was beating our asses silly. Man it was fun, ressing people, dps, healing yourself. Healing is a utility skill of which you can unlock many different kinds. As an engineer I put my skill points into a healing turret and my utility skill (which you can swap as you please) into an ability that lets me drop badage packs others can pick up, as well as a buff pack (vitality/speed/crit chance stuff like that) and there was a pack that removed conditions like bleeds, confuse, poison, cripple etc. Very cool. Every character has a ton of abilities that feel unique and interesting. I can't say enough good things about combat. You start to really feel powerful around level 8 or so, and that's when I got hooked on any character I was playing.

I played a Mesmer, Ranger, Elementalist, and Engineer the most. All of them feel fantastically fun, had interesting abilities and unique combat styles. I could go on about this for ever, it's that good. The PvP is tremendous fun, the WvW is insanity in a good way. It's also a quick way to see what a toon is like at max level with everything unlocked when you play "in the mists" as it's called. IT's like a WvW staging area with mobs you can test your skills on. As an elementalist, I turned INTO a tornado I could control and ran around the battle field destroying everyone. My god it's fun. I'm going through withdrawal, must have more beta....

Surprisingly polished for a beta, not without bugs but I found very few. Lag was a PITA in the early goings but by saturday it was sorted out and I had nothing to complain about. Oh, crafting! You get XP for completing recipes of which there are THOUSANDS. You also get XP for gathering mats for the recipes. You also don't compete for these resources either. Everything i don't like about MMOs is gone, everything I love is in. It was a fantastic experience, well done arena=net. If you have any questions i know I didn't cover it all, ask away!

As for PvP, there 4 battlegrounds and 2 scenerio. First, the sc's are different smaller maps with capture objective mechanic. As far as I saw, the maps are for 2 teams of 8 ppl. The gear you have gets changed with lvl80 PvP gear. So, no matter what level you are, you fight your foes in equal grounds in terms of gear/level. So, the 2 things that can bring you victory are teamplay and skill. As it wasn't very popular in beta, sc's are empty and we had to fight 4 against 7-8 constantly. There is an auto-balance but before it happens, more ppl left so I cant say I enjoyed scenerio. However, if you have a team and proper opposition, scenerios can be genuinely fun

Next big thing is battlegrounds. Eternal battlegrounds is where ppl from 3 different servers fights for dominion. In the map, there are objectives that gives you supplies (like supply depots) and there are keeps and towers that you store the supplies and use them to build things like trebuchet, cannon, siege mechanic beast thing to defend your keep, tower or attack foe's keeps, towers. First, you have to take control of a supply depot from NPC's. After taking it, it starts to generate supply and after a while a caravan of dolyak gets ready. A player needs to activate it and after that it starts to move towards nearest keep. Dolyak supply caravans can be attacked and taken down. So it needs a bit of protection. In beta, dolyak caravans are mostly ignored in the games I played. If you want to take a keep or tower, you need to take door or a wall down to get in. After getting in you have to kill the NPC keep lord to take control of it. Whats different from previous MMOs is, there is not only 1 point you can get in. Walls are also destroyable which makes things less boring for attackers. Because, if only door needs defense, it can be done way too easily by spamming AoE damage as the door is a narrow chokepoint. Eternal Battlegrounds also has a big castle in the middle of the map. This castle is huge compared others in the map. It has 2 set of walls so you have to take 2 doors down to reach the keep lord. It's also not boring to do cos walls are destroyable too. You dont have to get butchered million times at door.

As this is 3 way PvP and there are 3 servers, addition to eternal battlegrounds map, there are smaller server based map. They are called red, blue, green battlegrounds. As a green side player, I can enter green battleground to defend our keep in there and capture points like supply depots and towers or I can enter red or blue battleground and stop them getting supplies by capturing towers and supply depots on their maps. Those maps gameplay is almost same with eternal battlegrounds with only you dont have a big castle but only 1 keep to defend/attack. If you go to red battegrounds as a green or blue player, you only have a spawn point in that map and reds has a keep.

What I saw from beta PvP wise, large scale fights are fun but it needs proper groups to actually achieve something. Else, its just one team pushing ennemy to their keep and then ennemy gathers up in their keep and push back till the opposition keep... Also, the lack of CC (crowd control) immunity timers brings the danger of CC-lock. The Warrior with mace+shield has 4 stuns and if your ennemy doesnt have somekind of immunity system, you can CC him/her endlessly, leaving him as target drone for others. If you are a melee class, forget to charge forth cos you will end up dying in intensen amounts of AoE damage while getting constantly CC'd. Even with my thief I ended up using dual pistols and ranged weaponry to do some damage. This might not apply if you are in a group and the opposition has small or equal numbers. But in massive PvP, you better avoid AoE mayhem of the frontline if you are running around alone.

I played ranger, thief and warrior. As I'm obssesed with dual wield melee play I generally tried to go that way. With ranger, it was fine but the class reminds you that you are mostly ranged class. With Thief it was good with teleporting to mobs do damage and teleport out tactic...Until i met with AoE mayhem of open world PvP. I ended up with "meh" impression after that. On the other hand, the melee class Warrior, which sounds like a lesser version of ranger and thief because the class is not specialized in something, does the best job. It fits to any situation becuase it can use a shield, dual wield 2 full size 1handers (mace, sword. ranger/thief can equip only dagger and small weapons on off hand) and also has some nice AoE longbow. Warrior was the most versatile of all those 3.

I already pre-ordered the game and this game is something I've been waiting for long time. It's fun but needs a bit more polish to stop me playing WAR and completely move to GW2..

So I didnt play the first beta weekend but I did play last night for their super-surprise beta 'night'. I have to say it quite polished. Although I cant put my finger on it but something feels 'off' to me. (maybe its the character movement..You kind of glide across terrain rather than run/walk....I dont know)

It's kind of confusing at first and the game feels more like a J-RPG than anything else. Maybe once I get used to the control and UI schema I will enjoy it, but for now it is kind of frustrating.

Also something that I have a hard time with is tagging mobs. I know its a non-issue but when I play a melee toon and we are doing events its sort of frustrating when you see a pack of mobs charging you and before you can do anything a group of casters have OMGWTF-AOEd-The-bejesus out of them.

(\_/) (O.o)(''')(''') Watch out for evil Terra-Tron; He Does not like you!

I found melee and ranged combat equally fun and engaging - I've played JRPGs and I'd have to disagree with any comparison to them so far. I played in the long beta as well as a little 5's yesterday. The combat is much more difficult and skill based rather than your typical mmo button masher. I think this is primarily because you don't stand still while you cast your skills. Well you can, but I'll rip you apart.

My favorite two things to do are Necro tank while waiting for you to dot me to death, then transfering all the ailments to you. And Mesmer crashing you with all my clones as suicide bombers while I pick you off at range, then at last second, swap to close range weaponwry, swap with my clone, and stab your ass to death. I love the combat!

And now more waiting. I'd rather they get it all right anyhow. Looking forward to torchlight II as well.

ShadowEyez wrote:I loved guildwars, mostly PvE with a monk. Overall, is this new one similar or does it "reinvent" the wheel?

The lore builds upon the original as does the environment, but the game has changed for the better quite significantly. Gone are the days of not jumping and forced pathing. Lush detail everywhere, intense combat with combos and a variety of strategy for each class.

I had a blast last weekend, mostly playing my engineer with rifle/pistol/grenade combos. My favorite thing to do was long range rifle damage blowing all CDs, then swap to grenades to slow their pace towards me and aoe damage them, poison them. Then switch to pistols to deal some more quick damage using poison to combo off the poison grenade, all the while my turret blasts them. Sweet nectar.

1. Crafting is still a mess... Too many components to have in your inventory and still be able to have space for the combined-products (this is especially true for cooking which can have several intermediate ingredients before you get an edible end product.) It means that you will either have to spend a lot of gems on "bank access" tokens at the crafting table or do a lot of running back and forth to your bank.. either way = not fun. (and the food benefits need to increase as they currently are not worth the investment).

Crafting stations need to work as an advanced bank interface where you can work on things in inventory AND your bank to craft. If this means that crafting stations only exist in major cities I am OK with that.

2. Event aggro vs. groups of spawned mobs - If you have been a melee fighter in beta you have experienced this effect. You are standing in an event to 'defend' some area and suddenly a group of enemies spawn. You hit one, and then all 20 of the spawns 1-hit kill you because they have no other threat on anyone yet.

These event spawned mobs need to be set so they have spawn with threat already for some random characters in the event area, which would also spread them out more and make it less an AoE fest. (which is why everyone loves RANGE COMBAT in beta right now because you kill instead of die a lot).

3. Experience for mob killing needs to increase. Even doing every event and "heart" area in beta I found myself at times with no events/hearts still to do in my level range without going to all other race areas (and tagging along with higher level people doing events to leach xp). I should not have to do almost every event in my level range to level up, killing creatures should be a viable way to level. (right now to compare, a level 8 centaur gives 8 xp, compare this to level 8 events giving 250xp or level 8 personal story event giving 1,000 xp)

-=-=

Not to end on a sour note. I really enjoy their trading house (auction house). Very nice to be able to buy something or auction something in my bags or my bank at anytime/anywhere. Only having to go to an actual trader to withdraw any money earned or pick-up any item bought (and a gem store item can spawn a trader NPC where you are standing for 5 minutes). Great way to keep your inventory low and still get top prices for loot. And being able to set BUY orders, FINALLY!

Also being able to send crafting ingredients in your bags to your bank is very nice (doesn't work in reverse).

Being able to teleport to any waypoint you have visited from anywhere is also a welcome feature.

-=-=-

So yes.. a few bugs (IMHO) need to be fixed and tweaked, but I look forward to release with high hopes (and have taken the time off work).